Perhaps your own bones or your son’s bones will bleach at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
The fundamental cause of these future wars on the Pacific Ocean and in Eastern Asia, the cause, will be ignored or concealed by all International Peace Conferences and Conventions. And, afraid to admit the cause, they can not treat the cause of these wars; they will thus be unable to prevent these wars—these wolfish struggles for Eastern Asia as a capitalist prize. The leading capitalist citizens of the world have no confidence in these International Peace Conferences. Therefore they continue building more cannon, more battleships and more than ever they are teasing the boys—our own younger brothers of the working class—teasing them on board these great butchering machines.
Warn your neighbor—right away.
More and more defiantly the purpose is announced. In the year 1908 the President of the great American “Republic” uttered an imperial fiat—and lo! 18 battleships, 8 armored cruisers and a flock of torpedo-boat destroyers, with thousands of cheap and humble young fellows on board,—a fleet of butchering machines with the butchers aboard—pompously steamed ’round the earth on a forty-five thousand-mile cruise and carouse, meaning—meaning what? Precisely this:
The capitalists of the United States are prepared with “civilized” weapons, a shark’s appetite and a tiger’s methods, to conquer a lion’s share of the vast profits to be wrung from Eastern Asia if they can find enough gullible jackies to do the fighting.
Be warned—you toilers in the mills and mines and on the farms.
“During the last half century,” writes Dr. Josiah Strong,[[179]] “European manufactures have risen from $5,000,000,000 to $15,000,000,000. This increase of production has led the European Powers to acquire tropical regions nearly one-half greater than Europe. But while European manufactures were increasing threefold, ours increased sixfold, and we, too, must find an outlet.
“All this means that the great manufacturing peoples are about entering on an industrial conflict which is likely to be much more than a ‘thirty years’ war,’ and like all war will cause measureless misery and loss.”
The interocean Panama Canal, costing our country hundreds of millions of dollars, is simply one part of the American plutocrats’ plan to dominate the Pacific, bleed Asia, convert the “Republic” into a still less veiled despotism for conquest, commerce and profits to stuff the pockets of the modern Caesars who talk of patriotism and always lust for gold.
Mr. William H. Taft, in an interview, spoke thus threateningly in 1908: